It’s been done by better TDs than myself, but a question arose on SI-community so I decided to pull out and dust off a simulation I slammed together during green lantern in a couple of hours, as an example scene. I put this together when we were doing rapid look dev for a “green energy” effect at PLF, where a woman is rescued by splashing into a surface of “water” which then turns into a flood and whisks her away from the fight…

You can find the compounds and the scene used to make this image here.

I admit it. I’m bad about remembering to post compounds for download. But not today… I’ve added a bunch of simple-but-useful compounds, some of the ones I use fairly often for a range of tasks. Included are a bunch of emission filters which can be used for all sorts of things, such as controlling placement of scattered objects, such as the tree cards in the images below. Enjoy. – AM

As long as we are talking about Exocortex, they just posted this exciting preview of the next version of their point rendering tool Fury.

For those of you wondering why this is important, it’s simple enough. Fury is fast. Really, really fast. And it was written by Ben Houston, the original author of Krakatoa, a tool of choice for rendering particles. Softimage, Max and Maya users alike can move their simulations to ICE (or create their simulations with ice directly) and partake in the Fury awesomeness.

There is a good article online about Exocortex and the work they did using Slipstream VX for the last Harry Potter film. You can find it here.

Some excerpts:

The pool, known as the Pensieve to Harry Potter fans, contains an oillike liquid that sloshes around in its basin whenever someone gazes into it. While they had managed to make do with available tools in previous Harry Potter movies, this time around animators wanted the effects to be bigger, better and more realistic than ever before.

Houston, 32, sold the company a piece of specially designed software that mimics real world physics and helps to accurately create water digitally. The water special effect had taken Houston more than three years to perfect. The software tool was designed to work with Gradient’s existing special effects software.

“I went and further customized our software to meet the needs of the Harry Potter production,” said Houston, adding the experience has been “awesome.”

Animators at Gradient learned about Houston’s software from a review in a computer graphics magazine, he said.

Having written the magazine article in question, I couldn’t be happier for Exocortex. Good work, guys!

Test images created using softimage ICE and Exocortex’s Slipstream. I made them while evaluating and writing a review of slipstream and fury for 3Dworld magazine. Other images were picked for the article leaving these poor orphan images no other place to go than here…

Slipstream is a very handy tool, it’s super fast and you can tune a look independently of the number of particles used, meaning you can pump up the numbers for rendering without changing the behavior of the simulation… A big plus!